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sought them out and, on October 8, met alone with Percy. Whatever passed between them,
his cool, ambiguous behavior was the final straw for the abandoned Godwin sister. In a sad,
regret-filled poetic fragment, Shelley later recalled how “Her voice did quiver as we parted,
/ Yet knew I not that heart was broken.” Fanny immediately left Bath, traveling on to Wales.
The following day, in a Swansea hotel, she scribbled a note blaming herself and asking her
loved ones to forget her. The chambermaid found her dead the next morning from an over-
dose of opium.
The fact that a respectable and inexperienced young woman in Britain chose suicide in the
form of a half bottle of laudanum demonstrates both opium's easy availability in the imme-
diate post-Waterloo years and the fact that, though valued for its medicinal properties since
ancient times, the poppy's dangers were not yet widely appreciated or regulated. In 1816,
most English opium was imported from the Near East along the trading routes of the Mediter-
ranean. But since British deregulation of the Indo-Chinese trade in 1813, the global market for
opium had expanded rapidly, while the center of production and consumption shifted to the
Far East. By 1827, Britain's success in penetrating the Chinese market for opium had reversed
the flow of silver between the trading partners, which had so long been to the advantage of
the Chinese.
From that point, the long-powerful Chinese empire suffered a series of crushing setbacks
through the nineteenth century and beyond. It lost its leading role in world trade to Britain,
certified by the ruinous terms of surrender that concluded the Opium Wars in 1842 and 1857.
Consequently, per capita income for its citizens actually declined through the nineteenth cen-
tury while the Euro-Atlantic zone raced ahead in economic growth and technological ad-
ins of the “century of humiliation” that followed China's first defeat by Britain, opium was to
blame for the civil strife, famines, and military defeats that had ruined China's once great em-
pire and thrown the country into economic and social chaos. This anti-Western narrative—a
pillar of Communist Party historiography—focused on the evils of
imported
opium, a market
Great Britain had unscrupulously created and kept open with military force.
Our Tambora story, however, takes us further back in time in the history of Chinese opium
to the site of what would become the thriving center of
domestic
opium production in the Qing
empire: the southwest provinces at China's frontier. The Qing court had long been concerned
with the importation of Indian opium by the British and sought to control the trade along its
southern ports. Beginning in 1820, however, only two years after the end of the Tambora-
driven famine, Chinese rulers in Peking were startled to receive reports from faraway Yunnan
of a sudden explosion in opium production there. A poppy anticultivation program was insti-
tuted for Yunnan that very year, the first in a series of ever more desperate government meas-
ures to curb the southwestern drug industry. But to no avail. Opium in ever greater quantities
continued to flow south along the Red River into Vietnam transported by enormous caravans,
and from there by sea to Hong Kong and Canton, or eastward overland through China. Noth-
ing could stem the tide, and by 1840—during the first Opium War with Britain—Yunnan was
the acknowledged heart of domestic opium production in China. Not all of Yunnan's opium
left the province, of course. By this time, more than half of Yunnan's garrisoned soldiers were
reckoned to be drug users, including the officer corps.
22
What caused Yunnan's sudden transformation, in less than two decades, from a grain-pro-
ducing province well integrated with the empire's agricultural system to a rogue narco-state
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